Biased signaling pathways via CXCR3 control the development and function of CD4+ T cell subsets

Structurally related chemotactic cytokines (chemokines) regulate cell trafficking through interactions with 7-transmembrane domain, G protein-coupled receptors. Biased signaling or functional selectivity is a concept that describes a situation where a 7-transmembrane domain receptor preferentially activates one of several available cellular signaling pathways. It can be divided into 3 distinct cases: ligand bias, receptor bias, and tissue or cell bias. Many studies, including those coming from our lab, have shown that only a limited number of chemokines are key drivers of inflammation. We have referred to them as "driver chemokines." They include the CXCR3 ligands CXCL9 and CXCL10, the CCR2 ligand CCL2, all 3 CCR5 ligands, and the CCR9 ligand CCL25. As for CXCR3, despite the proinflammatory nature of CXCL10 and CXCL9, transgenic mice lacking CXCR3 display an aggravated manifestation of different autoimmune disease, including Type I diabetes and experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis. Recently, we showed that whereas CXCL9 and CXCL10 induce effector Th1/Th17 cells to promote inflammation, CXCL11, with a relatively higher binding affinity to CXCR3, drives the development of the forkhead box P3-negative IL-10(high) T regulatory 1 cell subset and hence, dampens inflammation. We also showed that CXCL9/CXCL10 activates a different signaling cascade than CXCL11, despite binding to the same receptor, CXCR3, which results in these diverse biologic activities. This provides new evidence for the role of biased signaling in regulating biologic activities, in which CXCL11 induces ligand bias at CXCR3 and receptor-biased signaling via atypical chemokine receptor 3.